Jacksonville makes the cut ... but does it matter?

Third-best place in the country to find a job? That’s Jacksonville. Fifth-best city to own a home? That’s Jacksonville, too.

How about the 15th best city for art? Yep, Jacksonville.

There is no shortage of lists ranking everything these days, and Jacksonville is becoming a regular on Top 10 and Top 25 lists.

No, they’re not all good lists to be on: Consider the 10 worst dressed, the worst water and worst cellphone reception list.

Jacksonville’s there, too.

But most of the rankings put the city in pretty good company and pretty good light: Best city in the country for recreation, second-best for professional, scientific and technical services, ninth-best for shopping.

Sometimes the praise comes with barely veiled digs. Jacksonville may be booming now, but it was “once a business services backwater,” according to Forbes magazine.

Or it may be more straightforward. Consider Slate magazine’s declaration that Jacksonville is the most average city in the country: “It’s a great example of a generic American city. It’s in the South, but not really all that southern. It’s on the coast, but it’s not ‘coastal.’ ”

But like it or not, Jacksonville is part of a movement. New Geography called the city the poster child for “a hitherto unnoted shift of high-end services to lower-cost and often lower-density regions.”

Michael Munz of The Dalton Agency said he’d just heard about a national client talking about how he’d read about Jacksonville making a Top 10 list.

“It used to be when someone from elsewhere said something about Jacksonville,” he said, “it had to do with the Jaguars or The Players.”

But does Jacksonville’s repeated ranking really mean anything other than a nice minute of conversation?

Maybe it helps that many of the lists come from Forbes, a respected business magazine.

“Does it have marketing value to make something actually happen?” said Maria Coppola, president of Coppola PR. “When there’s so many of them, it’s the perception of ‘Wow, there’s a lot of lists.’ It’s nice to be on the list, though.”

Few people are as involved in selling Jacksonville as Jerry Mallot, president of JAXUSA Partnership and interim CEO of JAX Chamber.

“Most of our use is validation,” Mallot said. “If we’re talking to a company that’s thinking about Jacksonville, it’s third-party validation of what we’re already saying.

“I used it just this morning,” he said. “A company in Louisville said it was having problems finding good tech people. So I could say ‘We have that, and guess what: Forbes has this list.’ ”

But Mallot said those rankings are really just the start of the conversation.

“It has to lead to more research,” he said. “If you give us the exact jobs your looking for, we’ll do an analysis to see how many people with those skills are in our market.”

Still, Mallot’s office has a list of rankings ready to send out to anyone interested in the city: Seventh-largest increase in college graduates, 10th-most digital city government …

Robert Arleigh White, executive director of the Cultural Council of Greater Jacksonville, remembers the first time American Style magazine put Jacksonville in its 25 best cities for art. That was eight years ago.

“We were astonished,” he said. “We wondered what these people know that we don’t. But Jacksonville is so spread out, we realized that if you squashed it all together, there’s a lot of art.”

He’s gotten pretty used to the ranking, Jacksonville has made the magazine’s list five of the last eight years. But he still hears from others around the country involved in the arts, inevitably with, “I didn’t know that about Jacksonville.”

“I think there must be an impact,” White said. “People visit Jacksonville to see what we have that they don’t.”

But there are still those other lists hanging around out there: Worst water, worst dressed.

“If we make the worst smelling or worst environmental lists, I’m concerned,” Munz said. “But as far as worst dressed? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

johnctaughtme, I agree. Jacksonville definitely has an anger problem. You can see it in many jacksonville.com user posts, but also in the way drivers are so quick to throw up a middle finger while driving on JTB with their kids in the back of the vehicle, or displayed in the attitudes of anyone who dares to stay past 10pm in pretty much any bar in Jacksonville.

Just look at the way any JSO officer working on or off duty behaves towards the public in general, or the rabid media frenzy whenever someone who is an upstanding member of our society makes a mistake.

I've been here for 8 years and people here seem to be unhappy by default. I don't get it.